The Illusion of Debiasing: Persona Steering Redistributes Rather Than Reduces Bias in LLMs
Prompt-based interventions: system prompts, personas, role instructions, reliably reshape what a language model says, but it is unclear which layer they reach. Do they reconfigure internal structure, or only modulate the output channel? We use persona conditioning as a controlled probe, measuring its effects along a depth axis from self-report, through open-ended generation, to word-level parametric association, across three instruction-tuned models. We find a graded dissociation. Personas are legible but not structural: models follow single-trait instructions yet fail to reproduce human inter-trait covariance. The dissociation deepens with depth: personas hold or amplify closed-form QA b...
| Authors | Ziyue Feng, Hongbo Fang, James A. Evans |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 7 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 September 2026 |
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